Thilo Sarrazin is breaking Germany’s taboos on welfare and immigration – and selling over a million books in the process

In Berlin in September, I noticed that Deutschland schafft sich ab (‘The Abolition of Germany’), a taboo-breaking blockbuster by Bundesbank governor Thilo Sarrazin, had just come through a new printing after having been sold out for a week. In the morning, as I walked off to work, there would always be a large table near the front of the Hugendubel bookstore on Tauntzienstrasse stacked two feet high with bright red copies. In the evening, as I returned to my hotel, the table would be denuded, or have just a few scattered copies, like the bar after an undergraduate drinks party.

Sarrazin had at that point given a few interviews, and the wildest nonsense was being said about him in the feuilletons. He was making eugenics respectable. He was a racist. He was rallying native Germans to xeno- (or Islamo- or some other kind o-) phobia. In short, he had written a Mein Kampf for our times. The Bundesbank and chancellor Angela Merkel bullied him into leaving his post. The Social Democratic Party moved to expel him. And although the Pope’s book of interviews managed to dislodge Sarrazin for a few days in November and a crime thriller called Snow White Must Die bumped him this week, his book is still near the top of the bestseller lists, having sold 1.2 million copies. It is the most important publishing event in Germany since the war.

Sarrazin’s book is no tract. It is a subtle, well-documented, almost literary argument about the failings of the German welfare state by a top-rank labour economist. Inevitably, though, it is also an attack on the political correctness that has constrained German political discourse for decades. Half a century ago Germany’s citizens — with good reason — came to a consensus that they could not soon afford another freewheeling Teutonic discussion on the matter of, let’s say, Lebensraum. Spectator.